But if you walk around to the north of the altar you will find yourself treading on tiles not so very far short of twice that antiquity.  Gentlemen, do not think that I would ever speak lightly of our lineage:  only let us make as certain as we may what that lineage is.

I want you to-day to understand just what such a pavement as that preserved for your inspection in Downing Street meant to the man who saw it laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years—­more or less—­ago. Ubi Romanus vicit, ibi habitat—­’where the Roman has conquered, there he settles’:  but whether he conquered or settled he carried these small tiles, these tessellae, as religiously as ever Rachel stole her teraphin.  ’Wherever his feet went there went the tessellated pavement for them to stand on.  Even generals on foreign service carried in panniers on muleback the little coloured cubes or tessellae for laying down a pavement in each camping-place, to be taken up again when they moved forward.  In England the same sweet emblems of the younger gods of poetic legend, of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy naturalism, are found constantly repeated.’[1] I am quoting these sentences from a local historian, but you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring prose at once scholarly and imaginative, as (for a more famous instance) the urns disinterred at Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne’s.  To continue and adapt the quotation—­

Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a spell-bound audience, Apollo singing to the lyre, Venus in Mars’ embrace, Neptune with a host of seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the fountain, Jove and Ganymede, Leda and the swan, wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns, masks, hautboys, cornucopiae, flowers and baskets of golden fruit—­what touches of home they must have seemed to these old dwellers in the Cambridgeshire wilds!

Yes, touches of home!  For the owner of this villa (you may conceive) is the grandson or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first built it, following in the wake of the legionaries.  The family has prospered and our man is now a considerable landowner.  He was born in Britain:  his children have been born here:  and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its essentials I daresay not so very unlike the life of an English country squire to-day.  Instead of chasing foxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport is good and he returns with an appetite.  He has added a summer parlour to the house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues:  for the old parlour he has enlarged the praefurnium, and through the long winter evenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a modern country-house.  A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him from the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-beds which will breathe odorously in the spring.  He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave-quarters and